Quote:
Originally Posted by wnut
https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/o...ding-arms-race
Liberty's latest agenda:
Preventing a manufacturer's arms race.
Limiting the cost of engines - good.
Breaking the Ferrari Haas partnership at Mercedes behest - bad.
"Mercedes has been as anxious to defend against Ferrari gaining an advantage from the arrangement as the independent teams have been to prevent Haas getting one up on them.
Haas’s punching-above-its-weight performance last season has probably brought this to a head."
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I would say a missing part of your commentary is that the article talks about cost caps as part of this. I think that if cost caps is a part of their strategy then trying to reign in something like the Ferrari/Haas relationship may be involved. I can think of two related reasons...
1. If you put cost caps on teams, then part of this will be associated rules to try to prevent funding of development that happens outside of cost caps. One way to do this is to have two teams that are operating with roughly the same technical solution. So you would get 2x the budget to develop what is "roughly" the same car.
2. To potentially get the large teams to agree to cost caps, you have to close the obvious loop holes that others may already be exploiting. So Ferrari + Haas and maybe even more so in the near future RBR + Toro Rosso.
Depending upon ownership, the slave teams may have little or no expectation to "perform" against the master team. But rather they act as sort of a on-track test team. Very much like TR was during 2018 for RBR. Granted, the master team doesn't want the slave team to trundle around at the rear, they want the concepts to do well and score points off the "second tier" teams.
Related to this is the entire "customer car" idea which at it's core (I think) is to effectively abolish the "Appendix 6 Listed Parts" from the Sporting Regulations that defines the items that are exclusive to a given team. Currently that is...
* Survival cell
* Front impact structure
* Roll structure
* Most of the bodywork
For the most part, that means the chassis (with bodywork) minus suspension, power-train and misc other bits.
So for the current Ferrari/Haas scenario they are using the same suspension and this works as it is not on the list above. Mercedes wants to expand that list to include more items. I assume that includes at least the suspension.
This goes backwards from the idea of a customer car.
Maybe an alternate solution is to create an additional category of items. This category would say that a team can create their own, or use a third party solution, but if more than one team uses the solution the IP owner can't restrict access to the parts. So in this scenario, if Ferrari decides to provide it's suspension to Haas, it has to make it available to other teams. There would have to be language around reasonable costs, etc.
Maybe that approach would be too complex. To be honest, what Mercedes proposes is a simple solution, but it does move further away from allowing customer cars. What needs to be found is a way to incentivize teams to rely upon off the shelf components for the basis stuff (provided by the larger community of third party providers) vs. develop and manufacture bespoke equivalents in-house. Those should be open to purchase by anyone and live outside of the cost caps.
Richard